A news post on the Company Of Heroes Online website contains this message from Relic: “After an exciting period of operating and testing, we will be closing Open Beta on March 31, 2011 to evaluate the next steps for the Company of Heroes series.” Sounds pretty final. Any cash spent in the game can be used up to that point, and anyone who registered with the game before February 1st can get Company Of Heroes: Gold Edition for $4.99. The message signs off: “We are excited to reveal the next evolution of the series in the near future.”

I shall try to find out a bit more information, but this is starting to look like one free-to-play experiment that didn’t quite work out.

League of Legends does very well with their F2P model that is pretty much only for cosmetic or personal advancement choices. A player is never forced to pony up, but the game drives a spirit of pride and competition that makes players want to shell out and differentiate themselves. LoL is making serious bank last time I checked.

trjp: I judge people in my Friends list hard on the Xbox if they’ve bought items for their avatar. The people are clearly too stupid to be allowed near money. Buying imaginary items for your imaginary representation. Idiocy.

Only items mine has is those accrued over games and freebie codes off the net. Never spent a cent on some idiot avatar item. Never will.

I played a bit of COHO with a friend. I thoroughly enjoyed it, but I also never looked at any of the microtransactions. I also picked up COH on steam for peanuts a while back, so while this is a bit of a bummer, I’m not really that upset about it.

What did CoH Online actually offer that its conventional predecessors didn’t? I have CoH plus expansions so never had the slightest interest in CoH Online; I saw it as basically the same game, but I’d have to play to unlock things I already had in CoH.

I have had the retail CoH for years, but have been enjoying COHO a LOT recently. I like the hero units and the fact that it is MUCH MUCH MUCH easier for me to connect and find a game (I used to have router NAT issues all the time with vanilla COH). As with a number of other people, I haven’t spent any real world cash on the game, I wonder how many people actually did.

Man… this is really upsetting. I’ve spent loads and loads of time playing Coho in the last few months. It’ll be annoying going back to Vcoh and being without my heroes, nice items and extra commander abilities.

I can only hope that they’re ending the beta so that they can start something even better :(

I don’t know, “we will be closing Open Beta on March 31, 2011 to evaluate the next steps for the Company of Heroes series” sounds more like “we’re closing to relaunch after a little bit,” otherwise why specify it was an open beta?

I gave up downloading after 3 days.
If you wanyt someone to download a demo, you host it on a fast server. You don;’t force them to run a crappy p2p client and sit through 2k/s downloads, and use up their upload bandwidth. Screw that.
I am a huge COH fan, and never got around to even installing COHO, because they were too tight assed to pay for bandwidth.
And making the downlaod so stupidly huge didn’t help matters.
Great game, managed really really really really badly by the publisher…

Funny that, I had a 2-3 mb/s download speed. Yes, it’s a hefty download, but it isn’t that bad (there are definitely even worse games out there). It might’ve been down to bad luck or whatever, but I felt like the servers were plenty fast.

I went to the COHO forums to see if there was any official confirmation if it was the end of just the beta or if they were going to kill the game altogether. It seems to be the latter unless they’re pulling some really heavy Obi-wan “depending on the point of view” bullshit:

“Yes. After March 31st there is no more CoHO. People who were registered to play CoHO before TODAY, can buy the retail game for $4.99 if they want, but it’s the retail game and not CoHO. The retail game is being patched, and that is to continue.”

I think it’s the “to evaluate the next steps for the Company of Heroes series.” Bit, and “We are excited to reveal the next evolution of the series in the near future” which does sound a little suspicious.

I’m afraid I was that guy on the CoHO forums for a while, so some of the long-term CoHO players might recognise this rant, but at the end of the day it was the terrible implementation of the heroes that killed the game for me.

You’d get a cool, shiny hero unit, but it would be given to you as a level 1 unit, meaning that it was an absolute goddamn liability, so then you’d have to spend ten or fifteen games in the singleplayer, spending tedious, tedious time focusing on levelling up that one unit, pissing away your charges, and then when you got them onto the field they immediately and completely broke the game because they were massively more powerful than everything else out there.

I suggested pasting them on top of the existing levelling system, having them come onto the field as what was essentially a normal unit, level them up automatically over the course of the game, and adding bonus XP for the things other units generally got XP for. I still say it would’ve made the game a hell of a lot more interesting and balanced, though I doubt it would’ve saved it from the fact that the whole experience simply wasn’t set up to work as a free-to-play.

CoHO was full of relentlessly smurfing four-year veterans, though, so all of the 1v1 was rape, and all of the other games were the usual godawful mess that is any RTS where you’re forced to rely on other people…

Am I missing something? Who gives a damn about CoHO? I give a damn about CoH and especially: “We are excited to reveal the next evolution of the series in the near future.” Does this not imply at least a new expansion and possibly a sequel? Given that they’ve gone to the bother of finally patching most of the 2.601 bugs/balance issues, it seems pretty likely. Is this not something to be excited about?

I’m actually hoping for official recognition of EASTERN FRONT, along with a single-player campaign for it, all released as an official expansion by Relic with the news that the modders have received a truckload of cash.